Patrick White - Happy Valley

It was very dull. They shot two more rabbits when Oliver woke. But still it was very dull. And Oliver knew it was. But I went there yesterday, he said, I shall not go to-day, the way Mrs Belper said, well, well, doctor, you here again? So he could not go to-day. The rabbits dangled, limp, their heads dark with the clotted blood. Rodney yawned and decapitated a flower. I am here and not here, Oliver said, that is why it is dull, and he knows, or does he, what does Rodney, never speaking, he is my son, Hilda’s son, I have a duty towards him, have brought him up to shoot rabbits against his will. There is so much I want to say to Rodney, only I don’t altogether know what it is. He is Hilda’s son. Alys said, if I had a child I shouldn’t mind, because it would be your child, like Rodney, who doesn’t like me, I feel. Don’t pull back that safety catch, said Oliver’s voice, suddenly sharp. I’m not, murmured Rodney. He beheaded another flower. Alys’s child. But Alys would not have a child, that he did not want, to pin the moment of perfection and then look down and see it dead, he wanted it alive and volatile, which alone was perfection, not with a pin through its back, she must escape this, even when they said things, because it had come to that he knew, they were saying things about Miss Browne and Dr Halliday. It made him feel savage, the glance of a face in the street. They were making it something different. Only Hilda said nothing, was silent. But you could feel a kind of silent opposition emanate from Hilda, which was only natural. She knew yesterday that the letter was from Garthwaite, that came with details of the Queensland practice, said he was willing to exchange, though not before August. That would be winter again. She came into the dispensary in winter with her hand. She was a patient. She had wrapped up her hand in a handkerchief, her mind in little artifices as a defence, and you peeled away, you probed, you knew her body and her mind, its perfections and imperfections. Before this you had not thought you could have loved someone for their imperfections, but somehow they made her more real. She was a core of reality in Happy Valley. And now they were beginning to hate, the people you passed, you could feel it. There is something relentless about the hatred induced by human contacts in a small town. At times it seems to have a kind of superhuman organization, like the passions in a Greek tragedy, but there is seldom any nobility about the passions of a small town, the undercurrent of hatred that had begun to flow about Alys Browne, or that poor wretch Moriarty. This had an unhealthy subterranean intensity. Which is what made these passions different also from the hatred between man and natural phenomena. You know how much to expect from fire or flood. You can’t say the same of your fellow-men outwardly united in a small community. A city is different again, almost a natural phenomenon. The individual may get hurt by the general trend of mass passion but he won’t be put on the table and deliberately slit open without any anaesthetic. Perhaps more acutely than anyone Hilda was conscious of this. Rodney must go to the city to school. Rodney must be saved, she felt. And now this letter from Garthwaite, inviting them to go away, to leave Alys Browne. The silence had grown oppressive, the sharp call of the whip-bird, and the pressure of the grey leaves. Rodney sat down underneath a bush and yawned. Want to go home? Oliver said. He could see that Rodney was relieved to return, to return to what, to answering Garthwaite’s letter and Hilda’s glance, wondering if that letter, he did not tell her, and the day had been a failure, he was a failure in relationship with Rodney, in relationship with Hilda. Alys touched with her hand your face and the material present dropped away, was immaterial. You began to breathe in a far more significant world. A far more significant world was yourself, but was also Rodney, was also Hilda, even George floating boats in a tub in the yard, each their own significant world. Responsible for these. The moon dropping molten from the earth, its origin, to cool and revolve, distinct. Rodney sitting in the car on the way home is very remote, like the moon revolving in another air, but it should not be altogether like this, for moon and earth have their seasons of approach, only I perhaps have failed to accept the possibility of this, I have made no effort, and going up to Kambala to shoot rabbits is not an effort but a feeble admission of failure. Going home a failure too. We are going home.

“We are going home, said Rodney, that red tank up on the hill is almost home is a house and Father walking down the hill whistling those big squares on her dress and she said she was sick because Antony had gone because love in books seemed to make you sick and it was funny and why love and why Father.

They drove down out of the direction of Kambala, where they had been spending the day. In the garden in front of Everetts’ old Mrs Everett in her Sunday black nudged Mrs Ansell and winked. The lids of her eyes were a scaly red.

Will you let me down here? said Rodney. I think I’ll go up to Quongs’.

Oliver stopped the car.

Right, he said, and Rodney got out. Not such a bad day.

No, said Rodney. It’s been a good day.

He stood there a moment uncertain, looking past Oliver’s face. Then he turned and went up towards the garage, looking down and rather red. Oliver started the car. It slid forward comfortably, like a lie that masks an admission of failure, like Rodney going up to Quongs’, relieved.

Rodney went up to Quongs’ garage and hung about outside, because there was nobody in the garage and he never liked to go up to the house, the way Mrs Quong snapped. So he hung about and whistled a bit, and rattled a tin that was lying by the side of the road. He put some stones in the tin and rattled it aimlessly. But the street was still deserted, heavy with Sunday, for people had either gone down to stand at corners in the main street, or else were pressed into their kitchens, those Sunday groups, fitfully conversational and the faces vaguely melancholy that stare from the windows at the outside world. But at least it was better than shooting rabbits with Father and not knowing what to say. And Margaret might come out. He looked down the street stealthily. They laughed at him for playing with Margaret Quong, called him Dolly Halliday and asked him what they played. This no longer made his face go red, as if by saturation in shame he had become immune, and playing with Margaret was a release, like reading a book, was not going down to school, was the antithesis of Andy Everett and stones.

After a while Margaret Quong came out. She was sucking a sweet in the side of her mouth. She walked down the garden path, and her arms dangled long and bony, and her legs had a sort of bony grace.

Hello, said Margaret through her sweet.

Hello, he said back.

They stood together in the road, the silence lit with those random flashes of intimacy that will make a silence significant. And sometimes they talked and it had a sort of significance that was somehow not in the words, but behind, and whether talking or silent they were nearly always content.

We had duck for dinner, said Margaret.

I like duck.

I like turkey better, I think.

I like duck.

We had a turkey once for Christmas, and when Father cleaned it there were eggs inside.

He looked at her, pondering a mystery.

Were there many? he said.

Four or five. Some of them were soft.

Did you touch them?

She nodded. He paused a moment and wrinkled up his face.

Let’s go into the garage, he said.

They went inside the garage. It was impressively mysterious below the girders, the shapes and smells and the patches of green oil. You could see your face in a pool of oil, like in a bubble, a bit out of shape. The pumps in the open doorway were gaunt and tragic in the frail light. Inside the garage it was getting dark. A voice made an echo, felt its brief and muffled way along the line of drums.